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Countless medical studies have concluded that playing too many video games
can be harmful to one's health. Now, however, it turns out that one of the
more popular video-game consoles on the market, the Xbox 360, could
be used to save lives.

A computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England has devised a
way to use an Xbox 360 to detect heart defects and help prevent heart
attacks. The new tool has the potential to revolutionize the medical
industry because it is both faster and cheaper than the computer systems
that are currently used by scientists to perform complex heart research. (See pictures of video-game consoles.)

The system, detailed in a study in the August edition of the Journal of
Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a video-game demo created
by Simon Scarle two years ago when he was a software engineer at Microsoft's Rare studio, the division of the U.S.-based company that designs games for
the Xbox 360. Scarle modified a chip in the console so that instead of
producing graphics for the game, it now delivers data tracking how
electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells. This
creates a model of the heart that allows doctors to
identify heart defects or conditions such as arrhythmia, a disturbance in
the normal rhythm of the heart that causes it to pump less effectively. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

"This is a clever use of a processing chip ... to speed up calculations of
heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without
having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer," Denis
Noble, director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, tells
TIME.

To create a heart model now, researchers must use supercomputers or a
network of PCs to crunch millions of mathematical equations relating to the
proteins, cells and tissues of the heart, a time-consuming and costly
process. Scarle's Xbox system can deliver the same results at a rate five
times faster and 10 times more cheap, according
to the study. (See pictures from an X-ray studio.)

"These game consoles aren't just glorified toys. [They] are pieces of very
powerful computing hardware," Scarle says. "I can see this ... being most
useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply
grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn't be able to
get."

Scarle attributes his breakthrough creation to his unusual background of
working as a software engineer in the gaming industry and performing
electrocardio-dynamics research at the University of Sheffield in England. The idea for the heart-modeling tool came from a "little shooter game" he developed at Microsoft in which a player trys to gun down enemies in an arena meant to resemble a heart. (See pictures of the heart.)

"I did a game-ified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present
some 'proper' science [based on] the cool things us game developers do,"
Scarle says.

The Xbox 360 isn't the only video-game console that is being used for scientific research. At the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, scientists are using Sony PlayStations to simulate black-hole
collisions to try to solve the mystery of what happens when a supermassive
black hole swallows a star. (Read "Microsoft: Out of the X Box.")

So perhaps parents shouldn't be too worried if their children are spending
an inordinate amount of time playing video games. Who knows, today's Grand
Theft Auto or Halo addict may end up discovering a new moon around Saturn or
finding a cure for cancer.